Learn to build mobile applications for the exciting new Android platform. When you purchase this product, you'll get access to the videos, slide presentations, and code examples associated with the online course, Developing Android Applications with Java, Part 1. This product will get you up to speed on the basics of Android development, including the Android SDK and the Eclipse IDE. As you learn, you'll build a simple Android app from start to finish.

Tony Hillerson

Tony Hillerson is a Software Architect for EffectiveUI. He graduated from Ambassador University with a BA in MIS. On any given day he may be working with Flex, Java, Rails, Maven, Ant, Ruby, or shell scripts. Tony has contributed to many community projects, such as RubyAMF. Tony has spoken at 360|Flex and Adobe MAX, as well as local user groups.

Tony is interested in all levels of usability and experience design, from the database to the server to the glass.

In his free time Tony enjoys playing the bass, playing World of Warcraft, making electronic music, making beer, learning Latin, and studying philosophy. Tony lives outside Denver, CO with his wife and son Titus.

The course is good but could do with editing a bit, sometimes the instructor drifts off topic with a typo so we get a bit of fumbling eg "so we just do steps 1,2,3 err no we don't err do it a different way" it would be nicer if we deleted that kind of stuff and spent a little more time on some of the code that is copied & pasted, trying to do 11 hours of instruction and delivering it without some cutting & editing is optimistic, sometimes I have trouble remembering where we are or why exactly we are doing something, more charts showing how different modules are connecting would be good.Having said that it is still a very good course and in this format one does put in the hours, I have yet to find the online blog which would probably answer most of my questions.So overall its better than most offerings out there, the instructor does know his stuff and one will learn a great deal.

You will get a good feel of things, but the class/object design the author uses is not something you should use within your own projects. I speak of the way tonnes of logic was jam packed into the custom Application class for dealing with the data. That just reeks of bad code design.

There are also some violations to Google code style recommendations (getters/setters).

On a positive note, there are a lot of Java/Eclipse tips that are really good for someone new to each of them.

I know this sounds a little harsh, but I am just being honest. Despite the mentioned negative points I do think the videos will get you familiar with things.

Bottom LineYes, I would recommend this to a friend

Merchant response: Tony Hillerson responds:

I agree with Chris regarding the code structure. The code was set up in a way that most easily supported the explanation of Androidfeatures during the class. I mentioned many times throughout the classes where I would have designed things differently "in the real world", but chose instead to keep code small and easy to explain.

As always, if anyone finds errors or takes issue with the design of the application, or even has an idea for a feature, I invite them tomake a fork of the code on Github at http://github.com/thillerson/oreilly_android and show everyone their ideas. You can see other forks of the code on the "Network" tab on the Github project page.

It was worth the money. I had paid the same for another class on a cross devices software that was shorter and less information. This did cover what I thought it would. Having a matching book would have been nice.

I attended the course live and found the pace just right with a lot of bang packed into the 6 classes. The instructor is knowledgeable, and addresses students' questions well. It does seem a little pricey, though I know that a lot of effort has gone into producing the videos.

The instructor gave great examples and showed the basics of what it's like to program on the phone. It touched on the basic things you're likely to do in a application, showed good file organization and good ways of getting around odd problems in the SDK. I would highly recommend this course to someone interested in android programming.